One last item before the end of the year. On December 6th, the Secretary of Commerce named the 15 members of the Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economy Advisory Committee. A mix of business and academic leaders, the Committee will “study metrics on effectiveness of innovation in various businesses and sectors, and work to [...]

Update – December 21 The court hearing over access to the voting machine source code ended yesterday, with the judge in the case requesting written briefs to be submitted by Friday, instead of oral arguments. While one voting expert testified that it was highly unlikely for the undervote to be a result of voter choice [...]

We don’t cover broad education issues on this blog, but we do cover aspects of globalization — particularly after ACM’s report on the globalization and offshoring in the software industry. It is hard to separate the two issues. Education is clearly connected to workforce issues, which are, in turn, connected to globalization. Realizing these deep [...]

Congress’ very short lame-duck session came to an end early Saturday morning wrapping up a largely unproductive 109th Congress in the technology policy space. In the waning hours, Congress did pass a few tech-related measures, but left almost all of the funding and competitiveness bills on the table — including funding for the President’s American [...]

The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) met yesterday in Washington, to handle regular business and hear testimony on the mid-term elections. The EAC was created as part of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to assist states and localities in the administration of elections and to administer the funds designated by HAVA for states to update [...]

Update – December 12 Materials from the meeting, including the webcast and text of the resolutions considered at the meeting, are now available on the NIST website. Original post – December 5 As I suggested in yesterday’s post the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) did revisit the software independent proposal during today’s session. It was [...]

As Cameron posted to the blog yesterday, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee is meeting today and tomorrow at the NIST Gaithersburg facility to discuss its advice to the Election Assistance Commission for the 2007 Voluntary Voting System Guidelines. The meeting is being webcast and will be archived for later viewing. Presentation slides should also be [...]

Update: The TDGC rejected NIST’s and the security subcommittee’s recommendations for software independent systems on a 6-6 tie vote. We’ve got a story about the meeting posted here. Update 2: The TDGC reversed course and adopted a compromise resolution that embraces the software indepence concept. David posted a story about it here. Last Thursday we [...]

We are playing a bit of catch up after the Thanksgiving holiday, so this story is not new news but we wanted to get it on the blog anyway. Last week (the afternoon before Thanksgiving Day) the Library of Congress released its final recommendations for exemptions to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright [...]